Hydrogen: First trial launched in Italy to decarbonize steel
The first trial conducted in Italy using hydrogen at a steel plant to process steel products started in July 2024. The collaboration between Snam, one of Europe’s main energy infrastructure operators, Tenaris Dalmine, a Tenaris company and a global leader in pipe manufacturing and related services for the energy industry, and Tenova, a leading developer and supplier of sustainable solutions for the green transition of the metallurgical industry, will last six months with the aim of evaluating the performance and reliability of using hydrogen in the steel industry and, more broadly, the hard-to-abate sectors that are the most challenging to decarbonize.
The goal is to use hydrogen produced on-site to fuel a burner recently developed by Tenova (100 % H2 ready) installed in a reheating furnace to hot roll seamless pipes at the Tenaris Dalmine plant in Dalmine/IT. The test will also help to define and implement safety guidelines and plant management procedures, thus developing integrated solutions that can significantly lower CO2 emissions produced by the manufacturing processes of hard-to-abate industries. Tenaris Dalmine will provide the site and reheating furnace, contributing its know-how to the installation, operation, and performance monitoring of the steel plants. Using its expertise in hydrogen-related technologies and molecule transport, Snam will provide an alkaline electrolysis system to Tenaris Dalmine, which will operate it to produce the hydrogen needed for the test. Tenova, in turn, will complete the value chain of the process by pooling its know-how on combustion systems and, in particular, supplying burners specifically designed to be fuelled with hydrogen. The project also includes a significant contribution from Techint Engineering & Construction, a company that provides design and project management services and is continuously expanding in the energy transition field, with the development of general and detailed installation engineering, the development of risk analysis and verification of compliance with legal requirements and safety standards.
With this first collaboration at the Tenaris Dalmine plant, Snam is supporting a major industry player in the Hydrogen as a Service modality, an ad hoc service that enables the use of decarbonized hydrogen in industrial production plants or other application environments, with Snam leasing the electrolysis system to the end user, who operates it. The program is part of Snam’s broader efforts as a system operator to guide industrial companies on their path to decarbonizing processes that need to be tested in view of future large-scale infrastructure solutions. The companies of the Techint Group (TenarisDalmine, Tenova, and Techint Engineering & Construction) consolidate their know-how by developing, implementing, and validating the technologies required to decarbonize hard-to-abate industries by gradually replacing fossil fuels with green hydrogen.
